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        4. Upper case or/and lower case in rel="alternate" hreflang

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        Upper case or/and lower case in rel="alternate" hreflang

        International SEO
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        • MartijnHoving82
          MartijnHoving82 last edited by

          Hi Mozzers,

          I have a question about the rel="alternate" hreflang tag, with an example.

          When I use two subfolders for two different countries/languages, for instance www.domain.com/nl-nl/ and www.domain.com/nl-en/ (for the English version) and I want to use the rel="alternate" hreflang tag, do I need to follow the ISO standards concerning Uppercase country code and Lowercase language code (en-NL)? Or is it okay to use the Lowercase country and language code (en-nl), since we also use this in the URL of the Subfolder.

          What does Google prefer?

          Thanks in advance.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • seowoody
            seowoody last edited by

            Hey there, Lowercase is fine.

            Not sure why you would have /nl-nl/ and /nl-en/ though, it's either English or Dutch, right?

            I've set this up many times before and it works just fine, although it's sometimes a little overkill unless you have the English version of a page ranking higher than the Dutch version in Google.nl for example.

            I usually find adding these as separate websites in WMT's and setting the target country correctly for each site you shouldn't have any problems.

            So add http://www.domain.com/nl/ as its own site in WMT and set target country to Netherlands, then add http://www.domain.com/en/ as another site and set its target country to UK.

            Hope this helps,

            Goodluck,

            Woody 🙂

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